About Me

I am currently a PostDoc working for John Moreland in the biomagnetic imagining standards and microsystems at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder Colorado. This is my latest research posting in a long series starting in 1998. I grew up in the Tampa bay area in Florida and attended the University of Florida for my undergraduate work in physics. Here I began working for Professor Andrew Rinzler shortly after he joined the facility in ‘98. I helped to setup his laboratory as well as prepare aligned carbon nanotube fibers and characterize them using polarized Raman spectroscopy. This has proven an invaluable experience as I learned practical laboratory skills.

After Graduating I received a Netherlands American Foundation – Fulbright grant to spend a year working for Cees Dekker and Serge LeMay at TuDelft in the Netherlands. Here I worked with an Omicron low temperature scanning tunneling microscope (STM) trying to measure the inelastic tunneling spectroscopy of single walled carbon nanotubes. I also had the opportunity to live and work in the Netherlands where I became a fan of bitterballen and korenwolfs.

When my grant ran out, I moved back to the United States and began classes at Cornell University in Ithaca New York. Once again I found a new facility member, this time J.C. Davis, and began working for him in the spring of 2002 after cornering him at the physics holiday party and getting him to agree to hire me on the spot. During my 6 years in graduate school, I worked on a variety of projects, including vibration isolation and acoustic damping, UHV sample preparation and transfer, STM troubleshooting, design and construction and analysis code utilizing parallel computing clusters. My thesis concentrated on an attempt to create a fitable model for the local density of states of the high Tc superconductor Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+x that explained local and bulk properties. While this attempt ended in a partial failure, it did teach me about modeling and computationally intensive parallel coding. This ended with one publication in graduate school and two more publications after graduation.

I graduated from Cornell in the summer of ’08 and began a PostDoc at University of Colorado Boulder for Professor and former lab mate, Kyle McElroy. Here I worked to finish up my graduate studies projects, while working on methods to extract observables from STM data on cuprates, the end goal being to quantify the data and allow comparisons with other probes. I also helped to supervise the two graduate students and two undergraduates in the laboratory and help them with their work on the low temperature STMs.

Wishing to stay in Boulder, I began work for John Moreland in ’10 after my postdoc funding for Professor Kyle McElroy ran out. This represented a drastic change in research topic as I began work on a project to measure the m-H curves of magnetic micro and nanoparticles for both biological systems and materials science. Here I worked with a room temperature atomic force microscope (AFM), and have recently completed my first publication on the topic. Currently I am entering my third year at NIST and am working on developing several applications of the system and exploring its limitations and capabilities. All while looking for funding sources and future employment opportunities.